WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that powers over 74 million websites. It can be used for static websites, blogs, or even eCommerce websites. Most web developers use CMS systems because it makes it easier for users to create, organize, and manage content with minimal coding. These qualities make WordPress a flexible and cost-effective solution for most websites. Our website is built on WordPress too!

We specialize in web design on the WordPress CMS because WordPress is…

Open Source. Open source software has its source code freely available online for anyone to contribute to, improve, and expand upon. We save development time and costs because we rarely have to “reinvent the wheel” on WordPress.

Fast & Easy. The WordPress CMS installs. Websites on the platform can be quickly developed (especially using themes) and easily maintained. The backend is intuitive and non-technical people can often make simple edits to content on their own!

SEO Friendly. There are tons of options, plugins, and features that make the WordPress websites a strong contender in the SEO arena.

Flexible. As mentioned earlier, there are tons of plugins and themes that can make your WordPress web design work in a wide variety of applications. It is easy to add new pages, new content, new blog posts, etc. It is also easy to update site-wide elements such as the navigation bar or color schemes.

WordPress does have some disadvantages. Here are a couple of particular concern to us:

Due to its flexibility, there is code in the CMS that your site might not necessarily need which can slow load times. To address this, we recommend using a great hosting provider like the one we use, Digital Ocean. We also use plugins and sometimes custom code additions/removals to boost the website’s speed.

Since WordPress is the most popular CMS, it is one of the most targeted platforms for hackers. To improve security, we keep your website updated, we use security plugins, and we make changes to the settings so that our websites are not the “low hanging fruit” that fall victim to automated attacks. We also maintain off-site backups of your website. Since starting this company in 2010, we have never had a website fall victim to a hacker or any malicious code.

Planning Your Website

The website design planning part of this service helps you to create and organize everything you need to successfully launch or relaunch your website. We can work with your team to create your website’s content or we can create it for you. Our web design planning process is outlined below.

Goal Setting

Your website needs to accomplish your goals. We will help you to set your website’s goals and determine the best way to measure our progress.

Keyword Research

Information Architecture Planning

This part of the process is designed to determine how many pages will be needed for your website, how they will be organized, and what keywords each webpage will be optimized for.

Website Content Planning

For your web design and development to go smoothly and efficiently, we will create and organize all of your copy, media, and other files based on where on the site they will be placed. Placement will be designed based on your sales funnel.

Delegation & Accountability

This part of our service will assign specific content creation tasks to your team so that everyone can be accountable for their portion of the website responsibilities (if applicable).

The deliverables for this service will be provided in electronic format and managed on a cloud file sharing platform, such as Google Drive or Dropbox, so that you and your entire team can access your files quickly and easily. It also simplifies collaboration and keeps us all on the same page.

Choosing Your WordPress Theme

If you need a WordPress website, we can help you. WordPress is our specialty. If you are looking for web design and development for another platform then we are not the right company for you. If you want to develop a WordPress theme from scratch, we can help you. The majority of our clients use commercial themes and have us customize them for their needs.

Your WordPress Theme Should Be…

Responsive

Responsive themes automatically adjust to the size of your users’ screen. This allows your website to work on desktops, tablets, and mobiel devices.

Practical

Your theme should be easy to use. This site’s theme has a heading at the top with our phone number and email so mobile users can tap to call/email.

Fast

Where to Look for Themes

Our go-to WordPress theme market for our web design services is ThemeForest. The best three themes I’ve worked with in terms of quality, flexibility, speed, and usability are (in no particular order): the Divi theme (from Elegant Themes), the X Theme (used on this website), and the Avada theme. When it’s time to choose a theme for your website design, we need to make sure that it also satisfies the needs discovered from planning your website. You can look for themes on your own and review them with us, have us choose some options for you to review, or a combination of these options.

Hosting Your Website

In order for your website to be accesible on the internet, you need to have your domain name registered and you need to have web hosting. Unlike many other marketing agencies, we recommend for your hosting and your domain to be registered in your name, not ours. This allows you to be both the owner and the gatekeeper to your website, not us.

Your web hosting is your server and the technology on your server that stores (or “hosts”) the code that composes your website. Your website host allows people on the internet to access your website when they go to your domain name.

Shared hosting is when you are sharing server space with other people. Your website and the websites of other people are all hosted together on the same server. This type of hosting has restrictions on what you can or cannot do with the technology running on the server. They also run slower than a VPS host.

VPS hosting is faster, more secure, and has virtually no restrictions on what you can do with your server. It is easy to scale with your website’s traffic and with your business’ other technological needs.

Recommended Web Hosts

We register our domain names through Namecheap or DreamHost depending on who has the better deal at the time. For shared hosting, we have happily used DreamHost (that link will give you $50 off your hosting) for nearly a decade. Recently, we have been moving our website projects on to VPS hosting in order to improve speed and control over our servers. For VPS hosting, we use and recommend Digital Ocean. This site is hosted on Digital Ocean and we expect most of our future web design projects to be on VPS hosting as well. We also recommend using ServerPilot to help manage your VPS server. You can have us help you or do all of this work for you as a feature of our web design service.

Web Design Testimonials

Tim

“Excellent partner to have in your toolbox. Paul knows what it takes to make your website visible and making money. Knows how to apply his skills for various business industries and requirements.” Testimonial from YouNeedMyGuy

Lindsey

“Paul is an extraordinary professional who is passionate about sharing his expertise in digital marketing with his customers. He is a patient teacher and consistently strives for honesty and transparency in all that he does.” Testimonial from LinkedIn

Jim

Website Portfolio

In addition to this website, here are some of our other recent projects (Launched April 2017) that we have designed, developed, and hosted. In addition to screenshots of the sites, we’ve also included screenshots of the websites’ Google PageSpeed Scores and Pingdom Grades to show off how efficient our code is and how fast our servers are.

Daniel Behan’s Business Card Website
This site was created as a part of a reputation management campaign to keep Daniel Behan’s contact information at the top of the SERPs.

Northland Computer Repair & Services Mobile Lead-Gen Website
This site was created to generate leads for a computer repair company. It’s optimized and designed primarily for mobile users.